By Shreya Indukuri, Junior at the Harker School in San Jose, CA, and ACE Youth Advisory Board Member

To sum up our long weekend in Washington, D.C. at Powershift 2011 in one word: incredible!

From April 15-18, Daniela and I met some amazing people and got inspired by young people doing some awesome things in their communities. Check out more about it in Daniela’s blog post.

Monday, April 18th was a particularly eventful day for us because we had the wonderful opportunity to meet Aneesh Chopra, Chief Technology Officer of the United States (as advisor to President Obama), and Arun Majumdar, the Acting Under Secretary Of Energy and the Director of ARPA-E (the Advanced Research Project Agency on Energy for the federal government).

First, we visited the Office of Science and Technology Policy, right next to the White House! After an awesome introduction from the Alliance for Climate Education (ACE) on the importance of climate education for youth through their ACE multimedia assembly, we talked about how we were lucky enough to use the resources provided by ACE to start our own environmental project at our school. The smart energy system we installed saved our school thousands of dollars and we had a 250% return on investment along with cutting our school’s energy bill by 13% in one year!

Mr. Chopra loved our project and he pledged to work on a plan to have schools benchmark their energy consumption using the EPA’s Portfolio Manager. This is fantastic because energy benchmarking is the first step of our 4-step smart energy school project that we work on in our organization, SmartPowerEd.

Our meeting with ARPA-E was phenomenal and we were so encouraged by all the support we received from their dynamic staff.

Dr. Majumdar also supported the work we’ve done at our school. ARPA-E is on the lookout for innovative energy technologies around the U.S. so they connected us to a similar local project at Stanford University. We are super stoked to learn more about them in the next few weeks!

We’ve got a lot on our plates with APs and the rest of the school year wrapping up but our experience at Powershift was incredible and we are so grateful to ACE for providing us with this amazing opportunity. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again, ACE has really changed our lives and we don’t know where we’d be without them!

Like Daniela mentioned in her previous blog post, we were just two high school students (without much direction at the time haha) sitting in on an ACE presentation. We seized the opportunity to apply for a grant, implement a project at our school and everything has just kind of snowballed since then. We now have started our own organization, SmartPowerEd, and successfully took the same smart energy project to two other local high schools.

Thanks for reading! And if you haven’t already, get an ACE presentation at your school! I guarantee that you’ll be blown away 🙂